I mean, what else was I supposed to write about here? Read the tagline: "Living in Seattle. Writing about Japan." and I'd officially just stopped doing both. If you recall, when we last left our hero(ld), the first draft of my book about Japan was complete and I was using that as the perfect excuse to finally leave the Pacific Northwest.

It was time for my Great American Road Trip™!
I was east-coast-bound!
A cruise ship docked on the horizon!

Well, I'm happy to report that my cross-country drive ended up being amazing.

My time on cruise ships, not so much.

[If you're curious, I successfully completed two contracts with Carnival. The first was to see if I was cut out for ship life, the second was to confirm that I wasn't. I'm sure I'll delve deeper into the waking nightmare that was working as an entertainment host but, until then, the following video pretty much sums it up.]

And now, here it is, precisely 3 years later (fittingly, on the 29th anniversary of the opening of "Back to the Future") and I'm back sitting in a coffee shop - right leg jittery from too much caffeine - spending way too much time composing a blog post. The view out the window, however, is quite different. I've traded the claustrophobic gloom of Seattle for the Instagram-filter-like haze of Los Angeles, my new home. Crazy, right?? But there's still some familiar territory:

I'm back at Mad Science.
I'm back in theme parks.
I'm even back capital-W-writing so it only seems fitting that I be back here too.

Sadly no, that doesn't mean I've started revising my book (hopefully soon GAWD DON'T PRESSURE ME) but I have started working on a screenplay - it's required within the first 6 months of residency in LA - and it seems to have awoken the somewhat atrophied part of my brain that liked blogging.

So weird, I thought writing on this thing was just a huge distraction but it inadvertently ended up producing a ton of actual content, some of it pretty decent. I also didn't think anyone was reading this stuff. Turns out I was wrong. (More on that soon.)

As for the blog's somewhat outdated "theme", I'm sure I'll figure something out. My brother once commented that "Black Coffee and Green Tea" was more than a blog title, it was a way of life, an apt description of me. I still take my coffee black, I still love my green tea, I still drink too much caffeine.

So, here I am! Not sure how frequently I'll be posting. Or for how long. Or if I'll even ever post again but I'm back. (To that same ol' place that I laughed about...)